After 127 years, the gavel falls on a country courthouse

The Litchfield County Courthouse has stood over the idyllic town green here through two world wars, the Great Depression and the transition from gaslight to gigabytes.

But the evocative interior had become outdated and inefficient, judicial officials say. There is no elevator in the building and the five cells or lockups in the basement have neither running water nor toilets. Judicial marshals must accompany inmates, some of them accused of murder, to a shared bathroom and escort them up and down the stairs.

As such, the courthouse, which handles major crimes and civil cases in this prosperous county in northwest Connecticut, will officially close on Friday. The Connecticut Judicial Branch will merge its district operations into a new court complex in nearby Torrington.

Far less clear was the fate of the old stone courthouse, a question only recently answered after the state investigated what had been local lore — that ownership of the property, if not used as a courthouse, would revert to the family that allowed the county to use it more than two centuries ago.

One of the courtrooms in the building. Photo: Jessica Hill/The New York Times

The legend turned out to be true: Because of a provision in the original 1803 land lease, the property will revert to a former Litchfield resident, now of Missouri, as well as the estates of his two sisters.

The six Litchfield men who originally leased the land to the county — civic leaders with names like Moses and Elijah — had stipulated that the property go to their heirs should it cease to support a courthouse.

“I’m going to be sad to see it go,” said Joette Viscariello, 50, of nearby Canaan, who was in the courthouse recently to support her boyfriend, there for a divorce proceeding. “It’s a beautiful building and the center of Litchfield. You can feel the history in there.”

When the decision was made in 2004 to build a new courthouse in Torrington, it was agreed that the Litchfield Judicial District Courthouse, as it is officially known, would retain some function, perhaps as a traffic court. Some $5 million was set aside to update the building, with plans for improved disability access and security systems.

But the courthouse project was delayed, and in recent years, after sharp cuts to the judicial branch’s budget had forced the closure of two courthouses elsewhere in the state, preserving the old courthouse here no longer made financial sense.

“The courthouse has served the community and the state well for many years,” said Melissa A. Farley, executive director of the external affairs division of the state’s Judicial Branch, which oversees the courts. “It’s a beautiful, historic building on the Litchfield Green and we’re all very sad that we have to leave it. On the other hand, it just doesn’t meet the needs of a modern court system.”

The decision to close the current courthouse, at 15 W. St., gave life to a new drama: determining if the property, which had been used as a courthouse for more than two centuries, belonged to the state or to the heirs of a Revolutionary War-era family.

Over the years, Michael Rybak, a local lawyer who once served as a state legislator, had told various state and local officials of the heirs’ claim to the property.

In April, the state conducted a title search, and it confirmed the inheritance rights that Rybak had warned about. The building will belong to the Beckwith family, primarily Rybak’s client, George Beckwith, now 79 and living in Missouri.

When Beckwith’s father, Sunderland Beckwith, died in 1986, he asked Rybak to record the lease provision.

“George always knew about it,” Rybak said. “He was the family historian. George told me to make sure to preserve our interest in the courthouse.”

As for the five other original property owners, their descendants did not preserve their claim to the property in probate court over the generations.

Inside Litchfield’s courthouse from about 1910. Photo: Litchfield Historical Society/The New York Times

In a letter from May to Rybak from the Department of Administrative Services, the state said it would “formally turn the keys over” after a final inspection of the building, adding that Connecticut appreciated “our many years of tenancy in your building.” Rybak said the lease had never required any rent payment by the state.

The courthouse is the third to stand on the site. The first, a wooden structure built in 1797, burned in 1886, according to Rybak. Over the next two years, a replacement courthouse was built, also of wood, and that burned as well a week before it was to be occupied. “It was specified that the next one had to be built of granite,” Rybak added.

The property is believed to be worth about $1.7 million, but Beckwith, who left Litchfield after his father’s death first for Kansas and then Missouri, is not interested in acquiring it, his lawyer said.

Instead, Beckwith plans to sell the property and recently signed a contract for an undisclosed sum with the Greater Litchfield Preservation Trust, a nonprofit group that owns two other historic buildings in town. One of those buildings, the local post office, is named for Beckwith’s ancestor Josiah Beckwith.